Under Two Flags eBook

The full consciousness of all that he had surrendered
in yielding up afresh his heritage rolled in on his
memory, like the wave of some heavy sea that sweeps
down all before it.

When that tear-blotted and miserable letter had reached
him in the green alleys of the Stephanien, and confessed
to him that his brother had relied on the personal
likeness between them and the similarity of their
handwriting to pass off as his the bill in which his
own name and that of his friend was forged, no thought
had crossed him to take upon himself the lad’s
sin. It had only been when, brought under the
charge, he must, to clear himself, have at once accused
the boy, and have betrayed the woman whose reputation
was in his keeping, that, rather by generous impulse
than by studied intention, he had taken up the burden
that he had now carried for so long. Whether or
no the money-lenders had been themselves in reality
deceived, he could never tell; but it had been certain
that, having avowed themselves confident of his guilt,
they could never shift the charge on to his brother
in the face of his own acceptance of it. So he
had saved the youth without premeditation or reckoning
of the cost. And now that the full cost was known
to him, he had not shrunk back from its payment.
Yet that payment was one that gave him a greater anguish
than if he had laid down his life in physical martyrdom.

To go back to the old luxury, and ease, and careless
peace; to go back to the old, fresh, fair English
woodlands, to go back to the power of command and
the delight of free gifts, to go back to men’s
honor, and reverence, and high esteem—­these
would have been sweet enough—­sweet as food
after long famine. But far more than these would
it have been to go back and take the hand of his friend
once more in the old, unclouded trust of their youth;
to go back, and stand free and blameless among his
peers, and know that all that man could do to win the
heart and the soul of a woman he could at his will
do to win hers whose mere glance of careless pity
had sufficed to light his life to passion. And
he had renounced all this. This was the cost;
and he had paid it—­paid it because the
simple, natural, inflexible law of justice had demanded
it.

One whom he had once chosen to save he could not now
have deserted, except by what would have been, in
his sight, dishonor. Therefore, when the day
broke, and the memories of the night came with his
awakening, he knew that his future was without hope—­without
it as utterly as was ever that of any captive shut
in darkness, and silence, and loneliness, in a prison,
whose only issue was the oubliettes. There is
infinite misery in the world, but this one misery
is rare; or men would perish from the face of the
earth as though the sun withdrew its light.

Alone in that dreary scene, beautiful from its vastness
and its solemnity, but unutterably melancholy, unutterably
oppressive, he also wondered whether he lived or dreamed.